Oliver Ressler will discuss some of the projects he did in the recent years dealing with the economy, the structural crisis it is struck with, forms of resistance, and alternative ways of organizing labor. Ressler’s films and installations often establish situations for people involved in social struggles to speak from. The 3-channel video installation Take The Square (2012) shows activists of the square and occupy movements in Madrid, Athens and New York, discussing among each others of how their movements organize, horizontal decision-making in assemblies and the tactic of occupying public spaces. The multi-cannel video installation Occupy, Resist, Produce (2014 – 2015), carried out in collaboration with Dario Azzellini, currently consists of three films on occupied factories in Milan, Rome and Thessaloniki. It focuses on the rare, better organized cases in Europe where the purpose of the struggle is to bring production under workers’ control. The workers do more than protest, they take the initiative and become protagonists, building horizontal social relations on the production sites and adopting mechanisms of direct democracy and collective decision-making. The recuperated workplaces often reinvent themselves, building links with local communities and social movements.

Oliver Ressler, born 1970, lives and works in Vienna and produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, global warming, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Oliver Ressler has had solo exhibitions in major art spaces such as Berkeley Art Museum, USA; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt; The Cube Project Space, Taipei; Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; and currently at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo – CAAC, Seville. Ressler has participated in more than 250 group exhibitions, including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; MASSMoCA, North Adams, USA and at the biennials in Prague (2005), Seville (2006), Moscow (2007), Taipei (2008), Lyon (2009), Gyumri (2012), Venice (2013), Athens (2013, 2015), and Quebec (2014). He is the director of 23 films. A retrospective of his films took place at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2013.

For the Taipei Biennale 2008, Ressler curated A World Where Many Worlds Fit. A traveling show on the financial crisis, It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, co-curated with Gregory Sholette, has been presented at eight venues since 2011. In collaboration with Ines Doujak he co-curated Utopian Pulse – Flares in the Darkroom at Secession in Vienna in 2014.